Academic Challenges (segment 3)

At the age of 35, I applied to Northern Arizona University’s Anthropology program to study archaeology and was accepted for entrance Fall 1992 – once again another recession was leveling the middle class in California and I entered the wave of migrants eastward for better opportunities. So many UHaul trucks were leaving California that I was asked to bring mine back to the state. Because I had no income for 1991, I qualified for financial aid. And even though I was to pay out-of-state tuition it was much less than University of California’s tuition. And, the out-of-state tuition was waived – likewise at LSU – studying outside of California was the best thing that could have happened as the quality of life and cost of living was so much lower. Plus, it broadened my horizons, I met some really excellent people both professors and fellow students, and got healthy again – swimming in the indoor Olympic size pool used by professional athletes for high-altitude training. Woohoo!
Unfortunately, and once again, I wrangled with a male professor, in a male dominant field, who curtailed my interest in using seriation for dating Anasazi pottery, and thus trade patterns. In fact, most of the archaeologists were male although 90 percent of students were female – and you know what fun that makes! An older professor, Dr. Hoffman took me under his wing and I wrote a paper on historic Flagstaff cemeteries and their relocation, and subsequent loss when they were built over by a park, university dorm, and Kentucky Fried chicken. Any evidence of Chinese railroad workers was obliterated from the surface when the park at the base of “Mars Hill” tennis courts were paved. I rented an in-law unit in the historic section of town, behind the town mortician’s house, and a large shed made of one-foot thick volcanic stone (malpais) where the blood of corpses were made. The Mormon records of births and deaths were instrumental to my historic research – Latter Day Saints maintain records that can be better than local and national census.
I took a course on Women’s History as an elective and along with a requirement that I repeat my UC Berkeley field work (“bad professor”) which made me reach out to emeritus Dr. Deetz (d. 2000) for acceptance to his Flowerdew One Hundred field project. (Girls, there are many “bad professors” out there – including those that will not support you on your dissertation if they have become distracted by “new squeeze.”) Any attempt to work on local archaeology projects in the Southwest were politically charged and territorially guarded. I couldn’t acquiesce to “sucking up” to do something a professor wanted for their own aggrandizement – archaeology was and still is MY life’s passion! Neither could I find a project that did not already have territorial claims on it – many sites recorded throughout the state have already been surveyed and “staked out” by at least three archaeologists, state universities or museums, including the Museum of Northern Arizona.
The academic fights over territory in Southwest Archaeology, especially Anasazi sites, are/were inflammatory and publicly infuriating. I tried to develop a cross-referencing system that would disclose where and which sites had been examined and where publications could be located, to little avail. Since then, a GIS database has been implemented for State Historic Preservation purposes. I worked on the Lake Ilo Project for a brief time digitizing geologic profiles and another summer project surveying Navajo repatriated land for artifacts that would then be used to deny habitability for the reason of ancestral “ghosts.” Both projects were politically charged, and marked the end of careers – really, get over yourself, in some cases they died, one from alcoholism I hear. For the wages of a non-English speaking immigrant farm worker we were to toil in the summer son excavating sites –digging trenches – that may have been inhabited for less than 20 years – while we as archaeologists would never own our own home but rather hire ourselves out as “visiting scholars” which is academic speak for “gypsy” or “itinerant laborer” – condemned to live impoverished due to student loan debt or marry an archaeologist that hopefully would give you equal credit (ha!). Okay, that’s a rant. [Seriously, though, here’s a hot tip – when mortgage rates are lower than Fannie and Sallie Mae adjustable interest rates, rolling your loans into the home equity is a great way out from under academic debt.]
Instead, I designed a master’s thesis that incorporated the GIS courses I had been taking at NAU’s Geography Department (Dr. Dexter was great!) and Women’s History (course taught by a “feminist” Mormon, Valeen Avery) to analyze the symbolic evolution of the Drunkard’s Path quilt pattern as a form of subordinate discourse in support of the post Civil War Women’s Temperance Movement through female emancipation in the early 1900s (http://www.researchgate.net/publication/34315986_Makin’_somethin’_outa’_nuthin’_). Although not expanded upon in my thesis, this was thinly disguised class warfare to suppress the lowly immigrant masses while creating and elevating their middle class status.
Out of necessity and to curtail costs, I drove my old Cadillac (1972 Eldorado – passed down during parent’s divorce) to the field work project in Virginia (camping and sleeping in my car with a trunk full of archaeology books, including historic ceramic design – I am tenacious if nothing else). I had a visiting scholarship at the prestigious Winterthur in Delaware, where Sotheby’s and other antique dealers and high end auctioneers research provenance of items. It was an unforgettable opportunity, and I worked diligently in the archives researching and transcribing by hand their catalogue of information on historic quilts. On the return trip, I stopped at various museums and quilt repositories to examine their examples of dated variations on the Drunkard’s Path – from Pennsylvania to Kansas. I met some of the most talented although not credentialed women and had a few encounters with quilt “snobs.” I did all this without a cell phone or roadside incident, by the grace of God I suppose.
The title of my thesis “Makin’ Somethin’ Outa Nothin’” had many meanings – from my Rumanian immigrant heritage as upholsters and rag pickers to my own frugal means of survival without compromise and the adversity I encountered in attaining my goals within very limited means – I have lived a patchwork life. By 1995, I had been at NAU one year longer than I had planned, I had nearly enough units to earn a second master’s in Geography, but decided I would test my fate by applying to Louisiana State University’s doctoral program, amongst others. I was shocked, surprised and scared to move so far east – farthest east of the Mississippi River I had lived since we lived with my dad’s family in Missouri when I was 3.